WRITTEN ON September 20th, 2004 BY Adriana Cronin-Lukas AND STORED IN Across the Board, Ideal Goverment - project

I think RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is one of the best examples of what I called emergent technology. By this I mean technology that has been designed by users for users rather than by a top down process. This is an article by Richard MacManus submitted to Computerworld NZ, based on an interview with Ferry Hendrikx of the NZ E-Government Unit. The target audience is mainstream IT people, so as well as writing about Ferry’s experiences in E-Government, the author decided to also explain what RSS is and put it in the context of everyday IT.

RSS is an XML-based standard for syndication of news and other regularly-updated content. It is being widely adopted as a form of online publishing – The New York Times and Reuters are just two big-name publishers who now offer RSS “feeds”. The New Zealand Government began using RSS feeds in 2003 to publish government news to the public. In July 2003 the New Zealand E-Government Unit released a document entitled “A standard for the publication of government news summaries”, which outlined their vision for RSS in the New Zealand public sector. I interviewed the document’s author Ferry Hendrikx, from the New Zealand E-Government Unit.

Mr MacManus mentions New York Times and Reuters, but closer to home, the Daily Telegraph and the BBC, have been using it for some time now to enable feeds for RSS newsreaders.

The case for RSS rests in one of the components of the New Zealand E-Government strategy, known as ‘publish/subscribe’ on the Web. The E-Government Strategy document published in 2001 declared that the Internet should be the dominant means of enabling ready access to government information, services and processes by June 2004.

The publish/subscribe model is seen as one of a number of ways of making information available and confirms it is one of our key goals. RSS can be used by the government both for distribution of information to the public and as well as internally. Hendrikx asserts that this model is equally useful for making information available for both public and internal consumption. This is what the report recommends:

This standard should be used by all agencies wishing to make their news stories available beyond their own website. Specifically agencies can use this system to avoid the manual and often duplicate entry of news stories onto the government portal.

Agencies implementing this standard and making news feeds available will need to notify the E-government Unit so that the aggregator can be appropriately configured to harvest news feeds from agency web servers.

The rest of the article contains some technical description of RSS, its history and the discussion of the format chosen by the New Zealand government. What is more interesting is that the potential RSS and other XML feeds have for dynamic and often updated formats. This is why most blogs automatically enable their readers to subscribe to updated content via their newsreaders.

Now, once more, without the acronyms:

• Having a way to get regular updates from a source you trust and want to follow without remembering to check it regularly is certainly convenient.
• Although updates by email can do that, our inboxes are already full of messages that we are not really interested in. The pull nature of syndication feeds puts the receivers of the information in control, as they can remove the feeds from their news aggregators.
• Newreaders allow you to aggregate feeds from various blogs and websites, which save much time. You do not have to download each page to read the content and you can avoid reading articles whose headlines do not interest you. This is a major advantage for someone (like me) who follows 60+ blogs that are updated a daily.

In fact, there are two ways to subscribe to updates from Ideal Government. You can either join the mailing list or add Ideal Government feed to your newsreader. Those who wish to learn more about the RSS magic, can email me at adriana at bigblog dot net.